Welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. We will be bringing you another season soon,

but in the meantime, I'm back with weekly updates on various aspects of climate accountability,

and occasionally with some book recommendations and interviews related to them. Like today,

I have joining me, Jake Biddle. He's a journalist for GRIST, and he also had a book come out just

a couple months ago about internal migration in the US caused by climate change. It's called the

Great Displacement. It's a great book, all stick a link to it. In the show notes, Jake talked

to me about all kinds of things he discovered while reporting this book, and it's pretty fascinating

stuff. That conversation is coming up after this quick break.

Hi, my name is Jake Biddle.

Okay, I want you to start by kind of setting the stakes for people. I feel like we hear lots of

numbers bandied about around climate migration. So in terms of internal migration within the US

driven by climate, what kinds of numbers are we seeing right now in the projections?

Right, so the most recent numbers suggest that each year upwards of a million and

closer in the past few years to two or three million people are displaced from their homes

for any amount of time by a climate disaster. The vast majority of those people end up

pretty quickly moving back to their homes, the original homes once they repair the damage or once

the immediate disaster is over, but a substantial number do not. We don't really know what that

number is, but it's probably safe to say that tens of thousands of people every year end up having

to spend at least a year out of their home or they end up moving to a different home eventually.

So the cumulative toll of this displacement over the next few decades is going to get pretty

large. You could imagine that in multiple millions of people over the next few decades, certainly

by the middle of the century, will have made a permanent relocation as a result of either pressure

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